Abstract: Relevance theory, which regards verbal communication as an ostensive-inferential process, focuses on communication and cognition. This theory has made great contribution to the study of literary translation. It explains why literary works are translatable. It can also make suitable explanation to the degree of contexual effect and to the phenomenon of retranslation. However, the object of relevance theory is the communication of co-culture, and the object of literary translation is intercultural communication. Therefore, literary translation has to deal with some issues like social culture, background knowledge and so on. Moreover, literary translation is not a simple logically inferential process of informative intention and communicative intention. That is, there is some distance between relevance theory and literary translation, because relevance theory cannot provide practicable means to the cultural default of literary translation.